White Zombie, from 1932, lives up to its name in more than one way. Though set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, well beyond the era of Toussaint Louverture, it has but one or two black characters; even the zombies are white. Was this curious bit of segregation a deliberate ploy on the part of the studio to get the film into Jim Crow–era theaters in the South? We will never know.

What we do know is this: A vacationing American couple comes to a Haitian sugar plantation at the invitation of its owner, who insists that they carry out their wedding plans there rather than down at the magistrate’s. (Haiti was once a popular quickie-divorce destination; apparently quickie-weddings were once a part of its landscape, too.) That plantation owner has an ulterior motive, for he has designs on the bride.

Enter a creepy character, one that might just as well have been called Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi, fresh from Tod Browning‘s vampire classic. “Murder” Legendre, as he’s sonorously named, drugs the fresh, pale Madeleine, who turns even paler and dies, only to be dug up and brought before the smitten sugar baron. Alas, she does not want him. Alas, being dead (or, as Billy Crystal explains in The Princess Bride, “mostly dead”), she appears to want no one, and now the trick would seem to be to stuff her back in the box and return her to her grave, with apologies all around.

Naturally, things don’t quite work out that way.

Though a sound film, White Zombie has all the conventions of a silent film, including interminable lags between action and reaction. For all its odd pacing and hamminess, it’s oddly fascinating. The first zombie film to be released by a Hollywood studio, it was almost immediately forgotten on release, and most copies deteriorated badly. A restored version was released in 1999, but even it suffers from poor sound and a few missing bits and pieces. It’s worth watching mostly for historical reasons, though the last twenty minutes or so are very well done, with Lugosi conveying unspeakable evilness, the groom projecting terminal dopiness, and the assorted zombies—white, of course—on the set imitating lemmings with grim determination.